The Center for

2016 Annual Report

Table of Contents

2016 In Review 2

Home Movie Day GIF Contest 2

Home Movie Archives Database Project 3

Home Grown Movies 3

Home Movie Day 2016 4

Home Movie Day Participating Cities 7

Board of Directors Activity and Retreat 8

CHM Board Members Lists 10

Financial Activity 10

List of Home Movie Day Organizers and Volunteers 11

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2016 IN REVIEW

2016 saw the Center for Home Movies carrying on with well-established programs such as Home Movie Day and Home Grown Movies, and increasing the scope and usage of the Home Movie Registry, while instituting a fun new tradition in the Home Movie GIF Contest and launching a new grant-funded project to survey the amateur collections in existence in a broader range of institutions than we’ve ever approached before. We even curated a sold-out screening of home movies at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville! Here are the details.

PRESERVATION WORK, NEW COLLECTIONS, AND SCREENINGS

1st Annual Home Movie Day GIF Contest

CHM is always searching for innovative ways to draw the public's attention to home movies and to highlight the efforts of the devoted archives and individuals who oversee the preservation and access of these important cultural documents. Through their hard work, a veritable wealth of home movies is streaming right now through various platforms. To activate engagement with these home movies and to garner excitement for Home Movie Day, we launched our inaugural HMD.GIF contest this past fall. We asked the public to make and submit GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) made from home movies they found online or in their own collections. We received 25 submissions from across the United States and Japan, which can be enjoyed on our contest tumblr page: https://centerforhomemovies.tumblr.com.

The winner received a $200 cash prize and was selected by a panel of judges including scholar and artist Jennifer Proctor and CHM board members Katrina Dixon and Antonella Bonfanti. The winning entry was “girl dancing in the yard,” submitted by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI). It was tough to pick a favorite among all the wonderful submissions, but the funky gal, dancing endlessly in a perfect loop, captured the heart of our judges unanimously. We will launch the 2nd annual HMD.GIF contest in the Fall of 2017.

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Home Movie Archives Database project

CHM was excited to receive a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to create the Home Movie Archives Database, a survey of home movies and amateur in archival collections in the United States. We regularly receive queries from people asking us where they can find home movies of a certain place or event or type, and too often we don't know where to send them because there is no central database of archival home movie collections. We have developed a network of colleagues in film archives, but we have also known that there are countless collections that are held in manuscript collections in archives, libraries, and museums. We are scouring online catalogs and contacting organizations about their collections in order to create as comprehensive a directory as possible. The database will be published in fall 2017, with information about thousands of collections in 300 archives around the country.

A 3rd year of Home Grown Movies Home Grown Movies, CHM's ongoing project of posting compelling home movies on our website, continued in its third year with eight new additions from around the world. This group ended up having a particular focus on the 1950s and 1960s, but showed a wonderful diversity of styles.

Mumbai Fashion Show is an unidentified orphan film of a 1960s fashion show that was purchased at an antique store in Mumbai. Christmas, by home moviemaker Skip Hawkins, captures the rituals of a Christmas morning, with energetic editing and a distinct late 1960s style. Easter and Funeral is a film shot by Hubert M. James during spring 1963 in and near Flowery Branch, Georgia in two distinct sections. The first shows the James family children searching for Easter eggs at their home, and the second the funeral of WWII veteran and James family relative John A. Reed. Cuba, Severna Park Maryland documents James and Mary Gordon’s vacation in Cuba during Batista’s regime in the mid to late 1950s, followed by wintery scenes and children sledding back home in Maryland. Orphan Spanish Home Movies are two untitled, anonymous films from Memorias Celuloides Archive in Cartagena. One depicts the filmmaker’s home life, while the other contains haunting accidental superimpositions. The Royce Family at Disneyland are two home movies shot at Disneyland in the late 1950s, soon after its opening.

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Brand Five, a thrift store find, is an unfinished spy movie apparently shot by an American GI in 1960s Germany.

Up until now, the films have been contributed by Home Movie Day representatives and posted in annual "seasons" of groups of films, but beginning in 2017 we will instead seek out home movies from the public, and post them occasionally as they become available.

Once again, we would like to thank Movette Film Transfer in San Francisco for their support in providing transfer services making several of the entries possible.

Home Movie Day 2016

Home Movie Day, CHM's annual all-volunteer event, was held on October 15th, with other events going on through the year. We continue to be thankful for all of the local organizers, volunteers and organizations who step up and make it such a special part of the year.

Increasingly, Home Movie Day is becoming a part of larger events. This year, HMD organizers also put on a film processing workshop, a home movie repair clinic, a display of home movie equipment, a year-long series of museum exhibits on home movies, and screenings of amateur films from the host archives, including a show of David Lean's home movies.

From its modest start fifteen years ago, the biggest surprise and delight to us at the Center for Home Movies has been event's growth overseas. Japan has always been a kind of second home to Home Movie Day, in a large part to the Film Preservation Society, which coordinates the Japanese events. Europe has also seen numerous events each year, and South America has been a particular growth area in recent years. This year there were Home Movie Day events held in a record 23 countries. A complete list of events appears later in this report, but here's the impressive list of host countries:

Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay.

Two countries, Israel and Albania, celebrated their first Home Movie Days, and we would like to feature their reports here:

Jerusalem, Israel (Report by Hila Abraham):

On October 18, 2016 the first Israeli home movie day ever took place at the Jerusalem Cinematheque – Israel Film Archive which is the home for Israeli Cinema and leader in the field of Israeli audiovisual preservation. Open to the public free of charge, people were invited to bring their home movies to a celebration of small gauge films which

4 together covered a whole range of places, time periods, subjects, and atmosphere written on celluloid. An audience of 25 people arrived and together we watched these images of the past accompanied by a live music performance of a harp player. People were invited to speak up during the screening – comment on what they saw or tell the story behind the film, exchanging experience, wonders and thoughts. A team inspected the films before the screening and tips were provided as to how to best take care of them in order to prolong their lives. For two hours, together with the greater international community who celebrate Home Movie Day, we gave the people the gift of sharing their personal memories as were captured by them or fellow community members in different times and different places.

The range of films was incredible, including several pearls:

Himsley-Farkash Home Movie collection (1917-1994): Hanna Himsley-Farkash (1917- 1994) arrived in Israel in 1926. 20 years later Hanna received her Ph.D. in bacteriology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Between 1945 and 1982, Hanna shot hundreds of home movies portraying Israel before its independence, the opening ceremony of the Weizmann Technology Institute, her journeys to Canada and the U.S., her life as a woman professor in the Hebrew University, trips she took all over Israel, and much more. Himsley-Farkash collection is preserved at the Israel Film Archive.

Films from Yad Va'Shem – The world Holocaust Remembrance Center: films that documented the Jewish community in Germany during the 30s, portraying everyday encounters and playful moments in a small village.

High school experimental film – shooting on film is more than rare in Israel today, so we were so happy to watch together this little gem made by a high school student during the early 2000. In his own words: "It was my high school teacher who opened me to the world of film and encouraged me to experiment with this medium & making a film on a super 8 camera. He helped me to find a camera and some super stock. This is a great opportunity for me to see it once again, as I haven't seen the film since I was in high school. There's no way for me to see it otherwise if I wish to see it as it was captured – on film".

Kibbutz Hulda Home Movie collection: dozens of films portraying holiday's celebrations and life at a Kibbutz, shot between 1960-1980. After the screening the Kibbutz decided to deposit their original home movie collection at the Israel Film Archive, trusted their audiovisual heritage to be saved in our climate controlled vaults and professional staff's hands.

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Tirana, Albania (Report by Andrea McCarty):

This event was held in conjunction with the Archives in Motion Workshops organized by the Albanian Cinema Project. The event was organized by American archivists who were in Tirana for a series of film preservation workshops, and most of the attendees were Balkan archivists in Tirana for the workshop.

Home Movie Day Tirana took place at the Radio Bar in Tirana, Albania, with five volunteers from the Archives in Motion Workshops / Albanian Cinema Project: Kate Dollenmayer, Skip Elsheimer, Andy Uhrich, Lindsay Zarwell and Andrea McCarty. The Radio Bar was a good fit for Home Movie Day. The staff was friendly, the atmosphere was casual and the bar itself was decorated with film projectors, radios and vintage film posters.

Skip Elsheimer and Kate Dollenmayer (center) at the Radio Bar, Tirana.

Our team sat and talked with audience members, made up of Balkan archivists attending the AIM workshops, about the images on the laptop screens, the importance of home movies and amateur film, and the mission of Home Movie Day. The goal was to spread the word about Home Movie Day to the Balkan archivists, with the hope that they will host HMD on their own in future years. We knew in advance that none of the Balkan archivists brought film to show, so the team chose to focus on screening films and spreading the HMD message, instead of setting up a film inspection table and projecting film. We set up a projector and began to project films on a screen. This brought the audience together as the archivists introduced the home movies they brought, some attendees played Home Movie Day Bingo, and even casual customers at the Bar began watching the movies.

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The HMD team brought home movies related to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, including Lindsay’s color footage of the Warsaw ghetto and pre-WWII Vienna from the United States Holocaust Museum, and Andy Uhrich's home movies of the former Yugoslavia in both color and b&w from the Indiana University Collection. Archivists from the State Archive in Split, Croatia identified locations, including Dubrovnik and cursed island of Lokrum, in the IU film. Kate brought films from the Wende Museum Collection, showing one film of a 1970s East German coming-of-age-ceremony and another of Soviet hippies. This instigated some good cross-cultural dialogue as Kate Dollenmayer explained what hippies were and asked the audience about hippiedom in the Balkans. There were lovely color home movies with vacation scenes from Croatia, Romania and other European cities, courtesy of YouTube and the Archive. Skip engaged the audience with home movies of a strange ritual among middle-aged Ohioans wearing umbrella hats and gowns, and his own family movie showing his sister dancing while his grandfather played the dulcimer.

The audience was particularly interested in images of Albania, including two amateur films with subtitles from the Library of Congress, showing rural Albania as shot by visiting Americans in the 1920s. Shpend Bengu, a media professor at the University of Tirana and ACP supporter, brought his own footage shot from a car as he drove through the streets of Tirana in 1993. Featuring the local neighborhoods surrounding the Radio Bar, the footage showed a city with less traffic, no graffiti, and more open spaces. Archivist attendees of HMD, as well as the casual customers and staff of the bar, were riveted by images of local landmarks as they looked just after the fall of the Albanian dictatorship 25 years ago. It was the perfect ending to the day.

2016 Home Movie Day participating cities A list of organizers and local event volunteers can be found at the end of this report.

ALBANIA CANADA GERMANY Tirana Edmonton Frankfurt Vancouver Toronto ARGENTINA Wellington ISRAEL Buenos Aires Montreal Jerusalem Saskatoon AUSTRALIA ITALY Victoria CHILE Bologna Melbourne Santiago Torino Cagliari

AUSTRIA CZECH REPUBLIC Vienna Prague/Praha JAPAN Hirosaki, Aomori Sendai, Miyagi

BELGIUM FRANCE Kyobashi, Tokyo Gent/Ghent Saint-Martin-en-Campagne Jimbocho,Tokyo Paris

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Chofu-city, Tokyo SPAIN Chicago, IL Yanesen, Tokyo Columbia, SC Cartagena Hirano, Osaka Durham, NC Málaga Naniwa, Osaka Georgetown, ME Navarra (Pamplona) Kobe Hanover, NH

Matsuyama, Ehime Lexington, KY Iizuna, Nagano SWITZERLAND Los Angeles, CA Azumino, Nagano Berne Louisville, KY Windisch Milledgeville, GA Minneapolis, MN MEXICO New Haven, CT Ciudad de México (3 events) THAILAND Pittsburgh, PA Puebla Nakornpathom Pleasantville, NY Saturday, Saturday, October Portland, OR 8th Raleigh, NC UNITED KINGDOM Rochester, NY London San Francisco,CA THE Motherwell Santa Clarita, CA NETHERLANDS Tucson, AZ Washington, DC Amsterdam UNITED STATES Williamstown, MA

PHILIPPINES Alamosa, CO Manila Asheville, NC Baltimore, MD URUGUAY Blowing Rock, NC Montevideo POLAND Boulder, CO Brookfield, WI Katowice Brooklyn, NY

BOARD OF DIRECTORS ACTIVITIES

CHM Welcomes Kate Dollenmayer to the Board of Directors CHM continues to attract the interest of vibrant young archivists eager to promote home movies by serving on the Board of Directors, this time in the person of Kate Dollenmayer, who accepted our invitation at year’s end to join the team. Kate works as the Audiovisual Archivist at the Wende Museum in Culver City, CA, where she stewards a collection of film and media from Cold-War-era Eastern Europe, including East German home movies from the 1940s through the 1980s. Kate has helped organize Home Movie Days in Tirana, Albania, as well as in Los Angeles and Ojai, CA. She also makes films and has worked as an educator, most recently as a member of the Visual Arts faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. Kate grew up in Massachusetts and received a B.A. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, as well as an M.F.A. in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts.

CHM Board of Directors 2016 annual meeting and retreat In January the CHM board gathered in Nashville Tennessee for our annual brainstorming and planning session, and continued our current tradition of spreading the word on Home Movies via a local screening. Our Nashville event turned out to be one

8 of the most high-profile Home movie screenings to date, with a packed house at Third Man Records coming out to see a representative program of home movies we curated especially for this occasion. Board members took turns introducing each film, which was then artfully accompanied by Nashville guitar virtuoso William Tyler. The program, which included staple gems from Living Room Cinema Vol 1 such as “Charlie Say Bagel & 4 Block Walk” as well as Sid Laverents’ masterpiece “Multiple Sidosis,” also included a section of Nashville Home Movies provided by PSU Film & Video. This collation of national / international material with local footage makes for an ideal “travelling show” concept we would like to repeat in the future.

Letters of Appreciation Each year during the retreat the CHM Board identifies a few individuals to thank for their particular contributions to the promotion of home movies with a formal letter of appreciation. This year we recognized Rick Prelinger for his presence at our 2015 retreat, and for the myriad ways he has supported our project over the years, from penning the introductory essay for Living Room Cinema Vol. 1 to his travelling series of Lost Landscapes films, and for his persistent advocacy of home movies in lectures and articles in various publications and venues.

Conference presentations/publications/interviews Skip Elsheimer traveled to Tirana, Albania with the Albania Cinema Project to conduct a workshop of film and video digitizing with archivists from Albanian, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Croatia and Montenegro. He also helped to host the first Home Movie Day in Albania.

Albert Steg travelled to California as a guest presenter in Snowden Becker’s Home MIAS Movie Seminar at UCLA in May, screening a variety of home movies and ephemeral films and engaging in a substantial discussion of the ethics of colorizing original b/w home movie footage.

Katrina Dixon and Brian L. Frye hosted the Kentucky Amateur Film Archives Holiday Party at Institute 193 on December 21, 2016. The screening included a holiday-themed DJ set by Robert Beatty, holiday home movies, and the infamous Santa Claus, Punch & Judy (1948).

Dwight Swanson organized Cinema Ephemera, a three-day festival of non-theatrical films held in venues throughout Baltimore. Fellow CHM board members Skip Elsheimer and Albert Steg showed films from their collections. Home movies were well represented, including Brian L. Frye “Selections from the Kentucky Amateur Film

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Archives," Jasmyn Castro's presentation of films from the African American Home Movie Archive, “Baltimorama,” a Baltimore ephemeral film showcase edited by Siobhan Hagan of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive, and a multi-projector screening by Baltimore film collectors Bob and Teresa Wagner. The festival's finale was a screening of No More Road Trips?, Rick Prelinger's feature-length home movie compilation film.

Dwight also presented a 35mm Amateur Night screening, at the Old Greenbelt Theatre (in Greenbelt MD).

THE CHM BOARDS

Executive Board Antonella Bonfanti Past/Honorary Members Katrina Dixon Snowden Becker Kate Dollenmayer Brian Graney Skip Elsheimer Chad Hunter Amy Sloper Katie Trainor Albert Steg Andy Uhrich Dwight Swanson Molly Wheeler

Advisory Board Ray Edmondson Rick Prelinger Mona Jimenez Melinda Stone Gregory Lukow Dan Streible Mike Mashon Russ Suniewick

Advisors in Memoriam Robbins Barstow Alan Kattelle William O’Farrell

Financial Activity

Note that the charts below reflect our most current Fiscal year, ending in May 2017 (this Annual Report report is coming out rather late this year). Expenses and income are consistent with our typically frugal budget. A particularly encouraging trend, however, is the substantial figure for stock footage income, which reflects the growing number of inquiries we are receiving each year for use of CHM footage in documentaries and other media projects as we make more footage visible via the Internet Archive and the Home Movie Registry. The absence of spending balancing the ‘projects’ income is because disbursements for administering the CLIR grant have not fallen within the 12 months of

10 this fiscal year, but will be reflected in next year’s report. CHM continues to spend within its means, with the help of generous donations from our supporters.

Partial List of 2016 Home Movie Day Even Organizers and Local Volunteers

Hila Abraham Betsy Curiel Reilly Saint Amand Emily Davis Kim Andersen Katrina Dixon Mark Lynn Anderson Dokodemo Art Club Rob Anen Kate Dollenmayer Elena Azzedín Melissa Dollman Carlos Barrionuevo Brian Drischell Snowden Becker Taylor Dunne Felipe Bellocq Katrina Lamberto Elsheimer Shiraz Bhathena Skip Elsheimer Molly Bragg Tim Emblem-English Alex Brooks Amy Ergler Cordelia Bucher Dino Everett John Campopiano Rich Fedorchak Braden Cannon Iraís Fernández Giulia Carbonero Macarena Fernández Puig David Carter K Sean Finch Amy Ciesielski Adam Foster Liz Coffey Hannah Franklin Matthew Cowan Brian L. Frye Danica Cullinan Eva García Marcos

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Ignacio García Kim Luperi Brian Giles Robin Margolis Christine Gissler Jon Marquis Mariko Goda Cecilia Martínez Sally Golding Sergio Martínez Marsha Gordon Mariko Matsui Jana Gowan Eliane Maurer Karola Gramann Andrea McCarty Jere Guldin Brian Meacham Joel Haertling Anna Sofia Mendes Siobhan Hagan Miriam Mieslek Asia Harmon Mary Miller Eiji Hashimoto Osamu Miyahara Heather Heckman Ai Miyazawa Fritz Herzog Daisuke Miyoshi Staci Hogsett Yuka Mochizuki Tim Holland Nozomi Nakagawa Wendy Horowitz Gordon Nelson Sadanobu Iida Jenny Noble Toyoo Ito Chris O’Kane Dean Jeffrey Jen O'Leary Jennifer Jenkins Satoko Ohashi Doug Jones Devin Orgeron Malin Kan Glynn Palmer Mari Kawamoto Lydia Pappas Julieta Keldjian Stephen Parr Lisa Kerrigan Brigitte Paulowitz Kentaro Kikuchi Giulio Pedretti Chiaki Kim Greg Pierce Ieyasu Kimura Bruce Posner Lynne Kirste Sukie Punjasthitkul Brent Kleinsteuber Kristen Purvis Mark Koyanagi John Quirk Klaudia Kuna Michael Ramos-Araizaga Justin LaLiberty Jack Reichhold David Landolf Rich Remsberg Trisha Lendo Elsa Pacheco Ribeiro Jenny Levine Tony Saffrey Andrés Levinson Hideki Sakamoto Leandro Listorti Pablo Sanchez Diana Little Sean Savage Grant Lobban Raoul Schmidt David Locke Stephan Schoenholtz Tania López Espinal Iwona Schuster Chris Lott Karan Sheldon Siri Luk Keiichi Shima

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Tomoko Shima Nana Shimomura Masaki Shiota Nico Soto Diaz Ruth Stanton Lenka Sucha Ayuno Takano Asako Takemori Hiroki Tanabe Noriko Tanaka John Tasker Charlotte Taylor Agata Tecl-Szubert Erica Titkemeyer Andy Uhrich Jana Ulipová Robert Vaszari Phil Vigeant Rhonda Vigeant Salvi Vivancos Yasonori Wada Bob Wagner Clare Watson Leila Weinstein Anne Wells Molly Wheeler David Whorlow Tim Wilson Tim Wisniewski Scott Woodward Naomi Yamamoto Yoshio Yasui Reina Yokoe Lindsay Zarwell Stefanie Zingl

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